CLEVELAND, Ohio – Reggie Rucker knows what it's like to go hungry, to walk the streets with his belongings in hand, uncertain where he and his mother would sleep that night.

He's also familiar with the pressure of conformity and the smell of a jail cell as the door slams shut behind him.

His experiences growing up poor in Washington D.C., have helped him relate to some of the at-risk kids he's trying to save as president of the Cleveland Peacemakers Alliance. The group's aim is to curb youth violence and handgun use.

"I'm not the kind of guy sitting across from you (that) you can say, 'You don't know what I've been through,' " the 66-year-old Rucker said. "Yes I do. Yes I do, baby."

He was born in Washington and lived in the hardscrabble Anacostia neighborhood during the 1960s. The former Browns receiver detailed his tumultuous upbringing in his 2002 autobiography "From Ghetto to God."

His mother had eight children by seven different fathers. They moved frequently, relying on the generosity of extended family and friends. Three stepbrothers died in prison.

Rucker committed some petty crimes in his youth and briefly belonged to a street gang. He was jailed for several hours after police caught him shooting out streetlights with a BB gun.

The lessons learned from that night, Rucker said, set him on the right course.

"These experiences helped me in what I'm doing today," Rucker said. "Because as the saying goes, '(But) for the grace of God, go I.' I could have very easily been in prison or dead.

"God had another purpose for me, I got a break . . . I wasn't going back (to jail). I was always on either on a basketball court, football field or baseball diamond."

Rucker earned a scholarship to Boston University before embarking on a 12-year NFL career.

In 2002, two years before joining forces with Jim Brown in the Amer-I-Can program, Rucker had another brush with the law that brought back painful memories of youth.

He had won a $2.2 million lawsuit – one he'd later lose in an appeal -- and flew to Las Vegas to celebrate. Rucker ran up a $25,000 tab at Mandalay Bay, paying back the first installment of $5,000 after receiving a letter from the casino. Rucker expected other notices to follow.

One night, Beachwood police stopped him for expired license plates. A routine scan revealed a warrant out for his arrest for insufficient funds in Nevada. He spent the evening in jail before writing a check the next morning to cover the difference.

"It was the longest night of my life," he told The Plain Dealer in 2002. "It gave me time to reflect. I thought about all I had been through. I thought about my three brothers dying, and that this meant all of Nancy Rucker's sons have been in jail."

Rucker has spent the past decade trying to keep other youngsters from spending any time behind bars.

Austin Carr on Reggie Rucker's workCavaliers analyst and former player Austin Carr discusses the work Reggie Rucker is doing with the Cleveland Peacemakers Alliance. The men grew up together in Washington, D.C., and remain close friends.

One person who's followed Rucker's evolution is Austin Carr.

The two Cleveland sports standouts met as teens playing CYO basketball in Washington. When the Browns acquired Rucker in 1975, one of the first phone calls he made was to the former Cavaliers star.

Years later, they are good friends who live in the same suburban neighborhood and belong to Stonewater Golf Club.

The Cavs television analyst has seen his friend play football, work as a broadcaster, raise three sons and get remarried to his second wife, Darlene. Carr appreciates Rucker's efforts with the Cleveland Peacemakers Alliance.

"This is what's needed," Carr said. "Our society in the inner city is cannibalizing (itself). It's coming to the point now where we have to learn to live together and not fight each other all the time . . . What's going to happen to our young people? They're going to grow up with no sense of anything.

"What Reggie and Jim (Brown) are doing is paramount to the survival of our inner cities."

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